What is missing from VtES?

Really, I want to know about the "better judge" aspect.

What has always been missing? Missing now? Or, something in between?

What has always been missing is a clear two-player version. There are various rules sets available, but I don't know what they are because I've never seen a standard for two-player play. This would have opened up the game to lots of additional players, though it could undermine the idea of producing a superior multiplayer product.

What is missing now involves some obvious things, like cards being printed, cards being sold through widely available channels, more players, but this doesn't seem to be what you are getting at, at all.

From a design/development perspective, I'd like to see a lot of stuff removed, rather than added, but that's not because I want the game to be more boardgamelike or think that some limit on cardpool size is going to be perfection. There's just a lot of unnecessary complexity, cards that play poorly (for a variety of reasons), and something that actually gets to answering your question.

The game started out with just the Camarilla. It added major indies, then Sabbat. The oWoD was far more appealing to some of us because of the sect dynamics and clan memberships in sects. To an extent, that transferred to the CCG. Over time, as more and more esoteric stuff was added, I felt the absence of the focus on the Cam v. non-Cam and Cam v Sabbat more strongly.

Something that is very much missing today, for reasons I can try to articulate but I don't think are justified, is developing the Camarilla. Because of the power of traditions and Cam vampires/crypts and Cam titles, we don't see a lot of variety of Cam/Cam clan cards that we could see. Well, that and supporting a host of other clans and disciplines and trying to have indies be competitive, etc.

The number of Cam allies is woefully short. Having things to do that are Cammy but not Royaltyly - that's something I'd push for getting the game refocused. The amount of design space open in the game seems vast. Using sect more often is one possibility.

Another is using capacity more often. Mix the two. Don't want to make Pander winnie more threatening, create Pander cards that require capacity above ... whatever.

Two inferior discipline cards. Numerous multidiscipline cards. Clans having more out of clans to produce the Tzimisce with Necromancy or Lasombra with Serpentis decks or whatever. Cards that can be played by multiple clans or like Baltimore Purge and Mozambique Allure, call out additional benefits for certain clans.

Cards that can be cycled more easily a la burn cards or trifles. For instance, a political action card that can be discarded for a combat effect. Speaking of politics, more things should interact with it. It was really designed with Jyhad level titles and effects in mind. Where combat has likely become far more interesting than the old days, I find politics to be highly unbalanced and uninteresting.

Deflection level disciplineless bounce, but I have a hard time imagining this ever happening.

I may hate events, but developing government into something relevant is a direction that can be gone without adding yet more disciplines and clans to the game. In many ways, go back and think about what resources Cam and Sabbat have access to and how they use them, especially the former.

Group 1. If you aren't going to cut Laibon and bloodlines from the game, make group 1 cards to balance groupings better.

And, so on. I haven't been spending much time thinking about the game this year, but there have been many, many ideas over the years, where few of what comes to mind get used. Like, Salubri ally ...

ICL wrote:

Having things to do that are Cammy but not Royaltyly - that's something I'd push for getting the game refocused.

Quite many good thoughts there but this is something I've been saying for a long time.

Compare the number of usable by any Sabbat vampire and any Camarilla vampire...


People used to say that belonging to Camarilla protected you from PTO, but PTO has been banned since so now there is not even that...

ICL wrote:

The number of Cam allies is woefully short. Having things to do that are Cammy but not Royaltyly - that's something I'd push for getting the game refocused. The amount of design space open in the game seems vast. Using sect more often is one possibility.

What becomes slightly tricky in this area is creating things that are worthwhile, but don't encourage the already good Camarilla title decks to include them - if it's a solid toy for a currently poor deck, it might well be a solid extra to scatter lightly into an already good deck. In the case of a good deck using fortitude (Ventrue being the obvious possibility), multi-acting potential means that it's not necessarily stopping them doing the normal thing they want to do that turn - bleed, untap, Parity Shift, untap, recruit this neat new ally, assuming that the ally is playable by a titled vampire (which I'm about to come onto).

You can potentially go the route of "requires an untitled Camarilla vampire", but that has two glitches to it. A mild theme glitch is that you might think that's the route of Anarch-y - untitled vampires getting together to do stuff. A secondary glitch is that some good title-oriented decks do include non-titled vampires - either in the crypt themselves or, for decks like breed boon, through vampire creation. So do you go down the rabbit hole of tacking on extra requirements? "Unique vampire" can work for weenies from breed boon, but less so for crypt vampires - Ventrue law firm isn't entirely immune to the attractions of vampires like Gideon Fontaine, for example.

You can potentially go the more tricksy design route of making the card invalidate other plays / be invalidated by other plays. If I'm potentially worried about a titled vampire using it after Parity Shift, you can use the fact that each vampire can call only one political action a turn to your advantage by making such a toy a political action. Ditto, a bleed action. But also, making a political action that's attractive for untitled Camarilla vampires that's a political action is somewhat weird - and making a bleed action that's better is also annoying, because untitled Camarilla vampires can still play Govern the Unaligned (or any other very good bleed card). This sort of invalidation isn't altogether impossible if you want an out-and-out ally card, but it does make life weirder for you

ICL wrote:

Two inferior discipline cards. Numerous multidiscipline cards.

I'm quite pro having more multi-discipline cards that don't necessarily go from "nec pot" to "NEC POT" (or whatever disciplines), because requiring two superior disciplines can be quite confining - particularly when you're potentially playing with vampires who are quite niche themselves. "CEL PRE" turns up on quite a lot of vampires in more or less any group pair, because it's found on four big, normal clans (Bru, !Bru, Tor, !Tor), but it's potentially quite a bit annoying if you're messing around with Ishtarri - you typically have fewer vampires to choose from for greater synergy. This generally gets worse if you pick discipline combinations that appeal to bloodlines, like - say - Nec/For. Even if you pick, say, For/Pre, which in theory works well for the Daughters' in-clan disciplines, there are so few of them that it can get icky, and you don't really want to be dragging Ventrue (or whoever) into the deck, messing up your Melpominee.


So I'd like to see quite a bunch more cards that take the Elemental Stoicism route of having one superior plus an inferior. So "cel pro" + "CEL pro", or "obf" + "OBF for", or whatever. It potentially lets you use it with a more cohesive crypt of midbies. For vampires from the "wrong" clan who have an interesting out of clan discipline or two, it potentially lets you do something weird and interesting. Say, that "CEL pro" suggestion is obviously aimed at City Gangrel Antitribu, but potentially enables something semi-interesting with a few random Brujah or Toreador antitribu, or whatever.

ICL wrote:

Deflection level disciplineless bounce, but I have a hard time imagining this ever happening.

I wouldn't want this. I would like more, and more diverse, bleed defence, potentially (and probably) including more availability of bleed bounce to other clans/traits/disciplines etc., but I wouldn't really want it to be disciplineless and on the level of Deflection. It potentially makes decks a lot more homogenous, if they can all toss in six of this new card. Obviously it would depend on the design somewhat, but if your aim is "Deflection level" power, you probably can't muck about with the design too much. Say, you could do something like "one per vampire per turn" or something - but in the world where it's disciplineless, that's less of a problem than it might be now. Obviously, you do have decks (lots of decks!) with Dominate on every vampire, or almost every vampire, but you also have decks where there are a few vampires with Dominate who are there to bounce. (Say, something like Domi-Ravnos, where there are some Ravnos with Dominate but not all of them.) In the world where something of similar power is available in a disciplineless fashion, potentially all those vampires can play it. Going back to the Camarilla breed boon deck I mentioned earlier, do I want all the weenies to be able to play "Deflection level" disciplineless bounce, even if they came out with Embrace (no discipline)?

But I would be potentially quite happy to see close-to-Deflection level bounce handed out to some other traits/disciplines etc. Magaji bounce, PRO+ani bounce, "tap an [ally type] you control" bounce, Black Hand bounce, or whatever. It's much easier to give a boost to weaker strategies in a reasonably controllable fashion, without having to think about the effect on basically every deck ever.

I would also be very happy to see other bleed defence options - better bleed reduction, anti-bleed, permanents etc. Say, bleed reduction that's playable by a tapped vampire (but limited in scope somehow) for card and blood efficiency, some permanent card that's anti-bleed along the lines of Aranthebes (but not the same).

ICL wrote:

Deflection level disciplineless bounce, but I have a hard time imagining this ever happening.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

I wouldn't want this. I would like more, and more diverse, bleed defence, potentially (and probably) including more availability of bleed bounce to other clans/traits/disciplines etc., but I wouldn't really want it to be disciplineless and on the level of Deflection. It potentially makes decks a lot more homogenous, if they can all toss in six of this new card.

If I understand correctly, you believe the status quo of including dominate in a deck solely for Deflection is better than the potential alternative of decks including six disciplineless bounce cards. How do you feel about wakes? Many decks include six of those because they're disciplinless and crucial to the deck's success. Why does something so crucial to a deck's success as wakes not have to require disciplines while something else as equally crucial such as bounce has to?

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Going back to the Camarilla breed boon deck I mentioned earlier, do I want all the weenies to be able to play "Deflection level" disciplineless bounce, even if they came out with Embrace (no discipline)?

The Embraces would be limited by the1-blood cost. It's either bounce and hunt next turn or don't bounce and not hunt next turn. This seems like a fair trade off.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

But I would be potentially quite happy to see close-to-Deflection level bounce handed out to some other traits/disciplines etc. Magaji bounce, PRO+ani bounce, "tap an [ally type] you control" bounce, Black Hand bounce, or whatever. It's much easier to give a boost to weaker strategies in a reasonably controllable fashion, without having to think about the effect on basically every deck ever.

I think this would all end up as wallpaper. Adding bounce to weak strategies will not boost those strategies enough to compete with Deflection, which is attached to the best strategy in the game (bleeding/Governing with dominate).

jamesatzephyr wrote:

I would also be very happy to see other bleed defence options - better bleed reduction, anti-bleed, permanents etc. Say, bleed reduction that's playable by a tapped vampire (but limited in scope somehow) for card and blood efficiency, some permanent card that's anti-bleed along the lines of Aranthebes (but not the same).

I think that introducing more bleed reduction would have the unintended effect of lengthening the time it takes to play a game. A disciplineless inferior Deflection is what's needed. Deflection would still be strictly better because of the superior effect. I just don't see disciplineless bounce like this being all that unbalancing.

TwoRazorReign wrote:

jamesatzephyr wrote:

I wouldn't want this. I would like more, and more diverse, bleed defence, potentially (and probably) including more availability of bleed bounce to other clans/traits/disciplines etc., but I wouldn't really want it to be disciplineless and on the level of Deflection. It potentially makes decks a lot more homogenous, if they can all toss in six of this new card.

If I understand correctly, you believe the status quo of including dominate in a deck solely for Deflection is better than the potential alternative of decks including six disciplineless bounce cards.

No, I believe this is fundamentally the wrong question. The aim is to make the game better, I assume - so the question is what is the right way to make the game better? And I think that choosing between the status quo and an option I believe is bad is fundamentally the wrong discussion to be having.

Going the disciplineless route for "Deflection level" tech:

- homogenizes deck types that could be vigorous and vibrant in their own different ways, so that they don't feel different. It's nice that, say, Brujah Potence combat feels very different to Toreador gun combat. It's something of a design crutch/flaw that so much politics devolves to playing Presence + KRC or Parity Shift, rather than there being interesting and meaningful differences between Ventrue politics and !Toreador politics, or whatever. It is nice for players to have meaningful choices that appeal to their playstyles: I find intercept wall control decks the very epitome of throat-slitting dullness, but other players love them. So it is nice when different decks feel very different, rather than further homogenized. (There is already a strong tendency towards homogenization from a variety of master cards - Dreams, Pentex, pick your preferred blood gain etc. - and to a lesser extent wakes, which I'll discuss later.)

- creates a design hazard for the future. If essentially every deck ever can play it, you have to avoid tripping over yourself when accidental synergy can occur. (Imbued might not be able to play it if it has a blood cost, which is fine. If you start wandering into heavy blood costs, or capacity restrictions etc., or other tomfoolery, you're not really designing something that is "Deflection level" bleed bounce, which was the stated goal.)

TwoRazorReign wrote:

How do you feel about wakes?

They're not, in general, Deflection level tech. Of course, at the right point of the game, a Wake can be a life-saver - but the point about Deflection is that you save yourself from being bled for 4 and aim 4 bleed at your prey, which is in general a much stronger outcome than merely being able to attempt a block as if untapped. (Also of course, you can play a Wake and then bounce.)

On a point of design principle, including Wakes should - so far as possible - be a choice you make. You might make a meaningful choice not to include Wakes, or many Wakes. Choosing between Wake and Forced and Qui Vive and nothing at all should be a meaningful choice. Perhaps you intend to just bleed/vote really quickly so don't really care to be untapped, or you feel you have a better/more versatile option from Animalism untap or Auspex Eyes of Argus, or whatever.

When designing Jyhad, Richard Garfield indicated that he regarded one of the 'mistakes' in Magic as being the use of "land" cards, which he didn't want in V:TES. Having to stuff your deck with essentially mandatory cards is dull for everyone. Now, Wakes and bounces aren't resources in the way that land are, but having a bunch of cards that you essentially just have to include to compete is dull for the deck designer. And Deflection-level disciplineless bounce is probably pretty likely to hit that point.

That's not to say there's no space for disciplineless cards - the bleed cards are a good example of how to do it reasonably well. Computer Hacking vs Laptop Computer vs Cameraphone vs JS Simmons/Tasha Morgan, vs finding something in your own clan or disciplines - those are potentially meaningful choices. (From a design perspective, I wish Computer Hacking was a fraction weaker - say, Do Not Replace - simply so that disciplined cards that were a " Bleed at +1" were an upgrade over it. But that's a minor niggle.) You don't have to include disciplineless bleed, but you can if you want to, and it's largely not terrible if you use it, but there are better tools out there.

Deflection level disciplineless bounce is unlikely to hit a sweet spot of being okay but not brilliant (it's explicitly intended to be "Deflection level"). And it's likely to be stuffed reflexively into a lot of decks. And then if you want to give decks back some of their diversity, you have to think about how to convince them to move away from Deflection level disciplineless bounce - and that's likely to involve a shift up the power curve, and Deflection level defence is already really, really good.

TwoRazorReign wrote:

Many decks include six of those because they're disciplinless and crucial to the deck's success. Why does something so crucial to a deck's success as wakes not have to require disciplines while something else as equally crucial such as bounce has to?

There are better/more versatile "discipline"d versions, and meaningful choices to be made. Deflection-level disciplineless bounce is highly unlikely to be a meaningful choice, in the way that Black Sunrise or No Secrets from the Magaji are meaningful choices vs a Wake, or as a complement to a Wake.

Wakes are also, as I said, weaker than Deflection-level bounce - you have to do something (risk a vampire in a block, get some intercept, play some cards) to get the real use of it. Not so with Deflection-level bounce. Additionally, much of the point of V:TES's design is that stronger abilities should require more resources - whether that's bigger vampires, more levels of a discipline(s), more blood, a title, a more expensive card play (e.g. master vs minion) or whatever. Many decks include a lot of Dominate bleed modifiers to oust. Why should something so crucial to their ability to oust require a discipline? Why shouldn't a Conditioning-level bleed modifier be available to all vampires for no discipline? Parity Shift is crucial to many decks - so there should be a version of the same power level that doesn't require a title.

TwoRazorReign wrote:

jamesatzephyr wrote:

Going back to the Camarilla breed boon deck I mentioned earlier, do I want all the weenies to be able to play "Deflection level" disciplineless bounce, even if they came out with Embrace (no discipline)?

The Embraces would be limited by the1-blood cost. It's either bounce and hunt next turn or don't bounce and not hunt next turn. This seems like a fair trade off.

Breed-boon decks can easily have many, many weenies out, so there's often not much of a trade-off going on - you've used up one of your seven weenies to bounce a bleed. The good decks also get use out of the weenies even when tapped. Breed-boon itself obviously can do so from Consanguineous Boon - get a pool, whether it's tapped or untapped. Eldest are Kholo, in some of the viciously horrible (i.e. good) Tsunda decks gives them two votes to cast, even though they're tapped, if you're using Tumnimos (the Chimerstry you get is fairly useless as a bounce discipline), or just being a Lasombra is fine for Power Structure, or !Tor for Foundation Exhibit.

Additionally, in the given that it's a one-cap vampire with no discipline card on bounce duty, it probably can't bleed for much - at least, not without a reasonable amount of effort. If that weenie bounces that bleed for 3 and hunts next turn, it's still potentially a six pool swing - three saved, three aimed at my prey, which is potentially better than the bleed potential it had from, say, two Computer Hacking actions. That seems like an unfair trade.

TwoRazorReign wrote:

jamesatzephyr wrote:

But I would be potentially quite happy to see close-to-Deflection level bounce handed out to some other traits/disciplines etc. Magaji bounce, PRO+ani bounce, "tap an [ally type] you control" bounce, Black Hand bounce, or whatever. It's much easier to give a boost to weaker strategies in a reasonably controllable fashion, without having to think about the effect on basically every deck ever.

I think this would all end up as wallpaper. Adding bounce to weak strategies will not boost those strategies enough to compete with Deflection, which is attached to the best strategy in the game (bleeding/Governing with dominate).

So you have all these decks you want to give disciplineless bounce, because decks shouldn't have to invest in disciplines for their defence (for some reason). But if you think that won't make any weaker strategies better, what on earth is the point at all? If you're just making good decks better, because now weenie Legacy of Pander can bounce as well, you're just pushing the power curve pointlessly, and making the game even more narrow.

I go back to what I said at the start: the point is to make the game better. Good decks are already good and don't really need the help, whereas the player struggling to make a weaker clan work probably does need the help. Doing so would make the game more fun for that player. That would make the game better. On the other hand, if the end result of Deflection-level disciplineless bounce is to make already good decks better and further increase the gulf between the top tier of decks and other strategies, that just makes life even harder for anyone who wants to experiment with something else, play a clan they find fun, or otherwise not play a Dominate bleed machine. That is bad for the game.

TwoRazorReign wrote:

I think that introducing more bleed reduction would have the unintended effect of lengthening the time it takes to play a game.

Very much depends on how you implement it. There have been many suggestions over the years of bleed reduction that turns into a bleed modifier, for example, giving you a sort-of mini-bounce. You can obviously have a variety of costs, upsides, downsides. Note that on a pool cost analysis, Archon Investigation is a 'bleed reduction' card of a sort - you lose three pool, instead of the 4 or more you were going to lose.

Nor does a card have to be only about bleed reduction. Give it an alternative use that's more overtly offensive - a bleed action, non-Presence vote push, a bleed modifier, capitalizing on some woe and dismay on the table, or whatever. Plenty of options to enliven a currently poor strategy, hopefully giving it real ousting potential, while also giving them a bit of defence. So you can potentially offset any time issues, by also providing options for greater aggression.

TwoRazorReign wrote:

A disciplineless inferior Deflection is what's needed. Deflection would still be strictly better because of the superior effect. I just don't see disciplineless bounce like this being all that unbalancing.

You've just said that giving weaker strategies bounce won't help them:

So, assuming that you're right, the only thing this can be doing is helping the better strategies. Making better strategies even stronger is pretty much the essence of unbalancing - you're pushing the top end of the power curve further, and leaving strategies players would like to play even further behind.